"We live in a moment of lies," says a colleague of slain Brazilian journalist Tim Lopes, in the new documentary series "Witness." In 2002, Lopes was dismembered while still alive and then burned to death in a microonda, a favored method of body disposal by drug traffickers in Rio de Janeiro.

The word translates as "microwave."

Cristina Guimäraes is speaking to Eros Hoagland, one of the profiled photojournalists working in areas of conflict around the world: Juarez, Mexico; South Sudan; Libya; and Rio de Janeiro. Produced by Michael Mann ("Luck," "Ali") and David Frankham, the four films will air on HBO over the next four Mondays.

With his scruffy good looks and unflappably reserved demeanor, Hoagland looks the part of the world-trekking photographer that he is. In a career that began in 1993 covering the aftermath of the war in El Salvador, Hoagland has toured many notorious hot spots - Afghanistan, Haiti, the Middle East - but Mexico, Central and South America seem to be his career's "center of gravity," he says.

He doesn't have to make the connection in words to the death of his dad, Newsweek photographer John Hoagland, who was killed in 1984 while covering the war in El Salvador.

What drives him

Eros Hoagland inherited both his father's equipment and his drive to document areas of turmoil. He is motivated in part by wanting to understand what took his dad away from their San Diego home so often. Now he knows, and it's the same thing that drives him, as well as the other photographers in the HBO series.

The moment of lies cited above refers to the "pacification" project taking place in Rio in advance of the city hosting the World Cup in 2014 and the Olympics two years later. The city that sprawls beneath the outspread welcoming arms of the towering "Christ the Redeemer" statue is, in fact, many cities. Tourists know the Copacabana beach, but they steer clear of the 900 "favelas" - gang-ruled slum fiefdoms - crawling up the surrounding hillsides. The government is trying to "pacify" the less picturesque areas of the city, slum by slum, before the world's attention focuses on Rio in 2014.

For the most part, it's a bureaucratic game of three-card monte: The cops and military descend on a slum, a relative calm ensues for a while, and then the killing and drug trafficking resume when the authorities move on. The homicide rate has gone down, but it's an artificial drop, say reformers who claim that the drug traffickers "microwave" the victims' bodies so they can't be counted. Even the cops get rid of bodies, they say, because they get more money if the death rate goes down.

Hoagland's job is to document moments of lies truthfully.

It doesn't come easily, not just because he's putting his life in danger when he treks into the middle of favelas in Rio, or when he photographs the drug-related homicides in Ciudad Juarez, directly across the U.S. border in Mexico. But also because even though he relies on his camera as a "shield" between himself and what he is photographing, what he sees through his viewfinder takes an inevitable emotional toll.

One of his most vital tools, he says, is to create a "personal bond" with his subjects, regardless of whether they are criminals, corrupt cops, militia or victims.

'Consequences'

He says it's increasingly difficult for him to bond sincerely with victims as time goes on, though. He knows he is lying to them when he says that "somehow my work will help them." Yet, at the same time, he believes "the pictures we take have consequences." Between those two seemingly opposite points of view, we get a telling look into both what drives Hoagland and others to be witnesses through their photography, and what inevitably touches and tears at them as well.

Hoagland's job, he says, is "not to mourn for (the victim)" or console the survivors: "I (am) there to document it."

French photographer Veronique de Viguerie, pregnant as she traipses through the jungles of central Africa with the "Arrow Boys" fighting against Ugandan Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army, wrestles with the same issues as Hoagland. In the "Witness" film airing Nov. 19, De Viguerie, whose boyfriend had died in her arms of a heart attack at 33, accompanies the ragtag resistance fighters at night following the trail of the Lord's Resistance Army. The plan is to get close to the encampment, but to wait until dawn to attack, for fear of killing each other by mistake, or perhaps the abductees being held by Kony's army.

Suddenly, there's a shot in the jungle darkness and a young man is hit - his blood-drenched body flashes briefly into view. De Viguerie reaches for the young man's hand, asks his name, tells him repeatedly not to go to sleep as he's rolled into a blanket and carried toward a hospital. "Just stay awake, Justin," she urges, saying his name over and over again.

"If someone is dying in front of you, do you take pictures or help them?" she asks later in accented English. "I'm a human first and a photographer second, isn't it?"

At every turn in this heart-wrenching series of films, we are reminded that these men and women are human, no matter how robotic they may seem as they rapidly snap off shots of death and tears. It is because they are human that their photographs have meaning and convey truths, which is one of the things you should find yourself thinking about as you watch the films.

We are inundated with images every moment of our waking lives, either through television, in print, on the Internet, on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram, or through our cell phones. Every minute aspect of life somehow seems to find its way to being recorded.

For posterity? Well, only if you define "posterity" as how long it takes before we need to delete images to make room for others.

Just as the Internet has enabled explosive and instantaneous access to words from all over the world, it has enabled a similar proliferation of images as well. We might conclude that easy availability and mass quantity of a "product" inevitably lessens its value. Yet, if we look hard enough, the better product can still be found, whether that product is a thoughtful, evocative assemblage of words or a great photograph that reveals multiple layers of meaning and context beyond its surface.

Burdens of loss

Two of the three photographers featured in these films carry significant internal burdens of loss. The third, Michael Christopher Brown, is younger, but was in Libya five times during the revolt that eventually brought an end to Moammar Khadafy's four-decade dictatorship.

In 2011, he was wounded in Misrata. He had been with veteran photographers Chris Hondros and Tim Hetherington. He looked up to them, learned from them. He called Hetherington a kind of "big brother."

He was always in front, Brown says. And they followed.

The city was "like a shooting gallery" that day in April, but nothing out of the ordinary in Libya in 2011. Then a mortar exploded, wounding Brown in the shoulder, but killing Hetherington and Hondros.

At the end of the film, they are gone, but we see their photographs, many taken on the last day of their lives.

If Brown didn't have his own internal burden of loss before, he does now. It is, to paraphrase author Tim O'Brien, one of the things he carries.